B991 <=> B993 [BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 992]

“’Here, the reciprocal inner relationship between husband and wife is the same; just as almost all the inner life of the husband is spent in being unfaithful to his one legal wife, so also the inner life of this one wife, from the first day of their union, is always straying outside the family.

“’For a European wife, as a rule, as soon as she is married, her husband becomes for her inner life, as they say, her “own property.”

“’After the first night, being then secure in her ownership, she begins to devote the whole of her inner life to the pursuit of a certain “something,” that is, to the pursuit of that indefinable “ideal” which from early childhood is gradually formed in every European girl thanks to that famous “education” which is ever more and more always being invented for them by various contemporary conscienceless writers.

“’During my stay in these European countries, I have observed that there is never formed in the being of a woman here, that “something” which should – in her as in our women – constantly maintain what is called “organic shame” or at least the disposition to it, upon which feeling, in my opinion, what is called “wifely duty” is based, and which is just what instinctively aids her to refrain from those actions which make a woman immoral.

“’That is why every woman here can very easily, at any favorable opportunity, without either suffering or remorse of conscience, betray her legal husband.

“’It is in my opinion owing to the absence of this shame in them, that here in Europe the line dividing the woman-mother from the woman-prostitute has gradually ceased to exist and that these two categories of women have already long ago been merged into one; so that at the present time there is neither in the mind nor in the feelings of the men here, that division of women into two categories which almost every Persian makes.